hey everyone, this is Bathmetrics. Welcome to episode nine of Mixing Loud with Clip to Zero. [Music] In this video, I'll be demonstrating how to set up the anchor and framework sounds for your entire mix. The loudness level that this framework is hitting will ultimately determine how loud your overall mix will be in the end, assuming, of course, that you're building a well-balanced mix around this framework. Before we jump into the content, quick reminder for people hitting this video for the first time. This is part of an ongoing series I'm doing called Mixing Loud with Clip to Zero. We're up to episode nine right now, which is this one. All this information is still coming in future episodes, so be sure and subscribe to my channel if you want to be aware of new episodes as they drop. I'm trying to roll these out pretty quick, and let's jump right into it. So, as you remember back in episode two where I talked about why we want to use CTZ gain staging, one of the strong reasons is that you're

always working up in the same dynamic range as all the mastered reference tracks you're working against, and that brings a lot of benefits. It especially brings a benefit when it comes to choosing your framework sounds to be appropriate for your genre, making sure those framework sounds are loud enough that you're going to hit the same loudness target as the genre you're working in, okay? And it's really a very simple concept. Let's, uh, start with a typical reference track. I make a lot of mid-tempo bass; that's what I enjoy, bass-heavy festival music. And so, for example, as those of you who follow me know, I really love this track by Res and Kotec called Teleportal. Um, so just briefly, so the YouTube gods don't smite me, let's just give you a level set and let you hear this reference track at its full mastered volume. [Music] Okay, got that? So there's a kick and a snare in there, and in this particular genre, the big important framework sounds tend to be your kick, your snare, and your

sub because the kick and the snare are very dry, very loud, very fat, very piercing. They're right up front, they're squeezed within an inch of their life, right on the verge of clipping, or just over the verge of clipping, right? And everything is built up into that framework of the kick, snare, and sub. Now, that's this genre. Just as an aside, for those of you trying to apply this technique to other genres, it doesn't have to be your kick, snare, and sub, right? That's dance music, and depending on the genre of dance music, it won't. Your kick might not even factor into it, like with trap. The big explosive drum sound that everything is anchored into is just the snare, right? The kick is usually just this little thumpy transient at the start of every 808. So, you could say in trap, your framework sounds are the snare and the 808, and the anchor for the mix is probably just a snare. That's going to be the loudest, most piercing impulse in the

entire mix, so that's the one that's hitting the ceiling at zero dB FS, right? And then everything else is mixed below that and into that to just be balanced against the snare that's taking up the full range, right? Or another example, if you've looked at my written clip to zero guide yet, which is linked up in the description, you'll find a place where I talk about a song called Congregation by the band Low. And that is not a banger, it's an alternative kind of track. It was used in episode two of the science fiction series called Devs on Hulu once upon a time. It's a really cool song, it hits seven loves, I mean it's loudness or loud, but it's this very calm muted alternative track, and it doesn't feature drums at all. The framework sound is really just the bass player playing with the finger-plucked bass at the same time as the guitarist plucking a kind of palm-muted guitar note, and they're just hammering out this line that goes

okay, I can't even. You know, my voice doesn't go that low, but it's just this heavy, low, thick bass plus palm-muted guitar. And those are literally the way they play it in lock step with each other. And it's kind of plucky and staccato despite being finger-plucked bass. It's the loudest rhythmic impulse in the entire song. There's these little dinky electronic drums way in the background. Most of the song is a vocal accompanying that, and that's how that song works. So in alternative genres, it's not necessarily your kick or your snare or any kind of drums. It could be something else entirely, but there's always something in every song that is the loudest rhythmic impulse in the song. It's usually the thing holding down your downbeat and your backbeat somehow. In that song by Low, it was a guitar and a bass. In dance music, it's typically kick and snare or just snare, and the kick might be really muted in the background. So it just kind of depends, and you have

to decide for the genre you play in and produce in. What are those important framework sounds, and of those framework sounds, what's the biggest, loudest, most important anchor? Because that's the thing that has to fill up the distance all the way to full scale. And if you've got your framework sound and your anchor sound matching the loudness, the perceived loudness of the reference track, then you're good to go. And so the whole trick is you find a reference track and a, you know, I'm gonna produce this type of song in this type of genre. Find some good reference tracks from that genre, and then you could just try and lay like play a little section and listen to the kick and the snare, and then go over to your, you know, whatever software you're using to pick out the drums that you're gonna use. Like Exo is a really good way to browse drums, you know, here's a kick, here's a snare, and you can, you can, you know, pop through here and find a drum sound that sounds

kind of like what you hear in your reference track, right? You hear that kick in that snare and the quality they have. So, you could just do a being back and forth using some sort of referencing software like this and, you know, dig around in your samples and compare it to this. And you're doing it at the same volume. This isn't normalized. This is just full volume, right? The original master. We're listening to the master at its full dynamic range, and we're going to find sounds that can hit that same loudness and sound roughly the same or be relevant to the genre somehow. And that's the whole trick. So, I find the easiest way to do this is so you have a reference track, right? And you know where the loudest kick and the loudest snare or whatever rhythmic impulse might be is hiding in that track. So, I tend to open things up in RX7 and zoom into a section where I can find the kick. In this case, the kick's right here, and I think the snare was this little

pulse right here. So, I just grabbed this tiny little section of the last drop where the kick happened, and there wasn't much happening after it. There was a little bit of space, and the snare hit had a little bit of space right here. And I highlighted this section and exported it to a 32-bit float file so that it's not 24-bit, 32-bit float, because you don't want any dithering or truncation distortion. You just want it to be a carbon copy of the original master, right? So, I'd export this tiny little snippet, and then we won't need this anymore. Then I come over to my DAW, and there's usually, you know, some DAWs like Ableton has Simpler, and you can use Simpler to slice up samples really quickly and easily. FL Studio has SliceX, right? Other DAWs like Bitwig, Studio One, they don't really have native slicers, so you have to use a VST for that. So, I tend to use these days, I tend to use Initial Slice.

which looks like this. And so I loaded that um little snippet that I exported from RX7. And again, this isn't normalized downward. This is the full-blown right up to zero master track that I'm working against. And I came in here and found a slice for the kick. And this is what it sounds like. And here's the snare hit over here. Yeah, that's what the original snare head sounds like. It's this really horribly distorted snare. But you know, it works for the song. So um, then I in this case, I just left them in initial slice. And they're playing on my C key and my D key. So I can come over here to my keyboard and just play them like in the song. Sounds like this [Music]. And yes, that's exactly what's in the real track underneath. You're hearing it by itself without all the other stuff around it. And you can see the kick looks like this. And the snare looks exactly the same except it's got all this white noise on top of the kick, right? So it's clearly a

kick layered with a snare. The snare's got some punch. It's got a crap ton of white noise in it, and this is what you know is used in that original song. And so if I'm trying to do a song with a similar feel in a similar genre, I'm going to want to find some drum samples that sound like these two things. So one way or another, whether you keep it in your slicing tool or whether you move it into a drum machine grid or put it on a track, however you want to make it easy to just audition the original reference kick and the original reference snare. [Music] However you want to do that, set it up right. So that's I'm doing it here in slice. Then you come over to whatever kind of tool or browser you like to use for finding drum samples, and I'm not gonna. I've got done a whole video on exo. I like exo right now. It's filtered out to just my sample for my folders full of mid-tempo drum sounds because this is

mid-tempo, and they have a certain sound, and they tend to feel a certain way. So, that's why the bright dots are just the ones from my folder full of mid-tempo stuff. And, um, I can dig around in here and look for a kick that sounds kind of like this kick. And sure enough, if I click on this button right here, you can see I found one that's pretty similar. Here's Rez's kick, my kick, a little higher pitch, but basically the same timbre, the same feel, the same punch, right? And they're pretty much the same volume. And I didn't do anything special. You'll notice the volume's cranked up all the way on this slider here. That's the volume slider for the kick. And over in the edit thing, I've got the whole kit turned up on this dial right here. So, I just, I'm just crunching everything as loud as I need to here to just hear from my browser, from my sample browser. I'm hearing it almost at the same level, or roughly the same level as, you know

the full-blown um thing from the reference track that I have loaded in the initial slice versus clicking this right so almost the same I can hear it's the same kind of kick so good so what I do is come over here to my drum machine grid that I'm going to use for kicks in my kick channel and I just you know come up here and grab this little guy and drag it over and drop it on a you know a grid in my thing and now I've got a kick sample to start with now it's not going to be as loud by the time I drag it over here necessarily because I've turned up volumes in this editor um to hear things at the same volume but you get the idea you find a kick that sounds pretty much the same and then you do the same thing for the snare so here's Reza's original snare and then here's the snare that I found somewhere over here [Music] higher pitched but again it has that same snap it has that same pierce it has

the same long white noisy tail to it. [Music] That's res's. Here's mine, and you can hear they're roughly the same volume again because it's cranked up. And then I come over, and I export, and I drag the snare into my snare machine. Okay, so that's how you get a kick and a snare sample that sounds similar to your reference track and that are the same, you know, they have the same quality and timbre and the same loudness. Now, there were other snares I dug through and other kicks I dug through that I might have liked, but when I turned them up as loud as the reference track, I could hear they were distorting. I could hear they were getting, you know, clipped, and they weren't, or just there were aspects of them that couldn't get loud in the same way and still sound good. So right off the bat, by working in the same volume range as the reference track, the same dynamic range, the same loudness, I'm immediately failing on certain

sounds that I might like, but you know that boomy or thuddy kick just won't work that loud, right? But I can quickly dial in kicks and snares that do work this loud, drag them into my project, get them set up in drum machines, and I'm ready to go a step further now, right? So once they're in the project, you might do a little sound design on them, you might clean them up. Um, let me show you what I ended up with at the end just so you can kind of hear how building a mix around that kick and that snare worked out. And let me also show you the sub. So I've got the, let's solo the kick, let's solo the snare, and let's also solo the sub just so you can hear those three elements together and kind of see them on the graph. Let's also turn off the tops and the midline. So orange is this kick, blue is the snare, purple is a sub. Sounds like this [Music]. They're in balance with each other. The

sub is not too loud. It's not too soft. Basically, a good rule of thumb for the sub, once you have your kick in your snare, and they're hitting up at the same full scale range, right? These lines, this is 0 dB, this is -3 dB, this is -6. And you'll notice the sub is sitting right around the -6 line, and that's usually a good starting point for dance music, especially bass-heavy dance music. Now, subs are treated differently in different subgenres of dance music. So, for this kind of song, the sub sits about here. It's about -6 dB below the kick in general. Could be a little louder, could be a little softer, but usually right around -6 dB. Other genres of dance music might reduce the sub a lot from here. They might go down to -7 or -8 or even -9 dB below full scale, below where the kick is hitting. So, it just kind of depends. You have to know your genre, but the point is, I balanced

this framework of the anchor kick, a snare that's equally loud, and blends well with the kick, even when they're layered on top of each other in this four-on-the-floor pattern. And then the sub, they're all balanced with each other. [Music] And because the kick and the snare are just as loud as my reference track, I know that as I start building in and adding in other sounds here and building a mix around this framework that you're looking at, I know that my mix will end up being right in the same loudness ballpark as the reference track I was working from, right? So let's hear that in action. Let's unsolo these so we're hearing the other sounds. I've got some hats adding some high energy in the highest part of the spectrum. I've got some spicy glitchy percussive sounds adding some interest to the kick and snare line. And then I have a rolling bass riff on top of it, and it sounds like this when we put it all together.

[Music] Okay, now let's compare it with the reference track. Again, same level. I'm just going to flip over to Rez's track, do it briefly so the YouTube gods don't smite me, and here we go. [Music] Right, same ballpark, same basic loudness, same energy, same density. And I got there by just, again, listening to your reference track, snipping out those anchor sounds, those important framework sounds, snipping them out, getting them isolated so you can hear them clearly, hear how loud they actually are, hear what kind of tone and timbre they have, and what kind of hit and punch they have. Then go dig through your samples or build your own drums with a drum designer or whatever you want to do, and compare them against, you know, the things you've snipped out of your reference track, which is this. [Music] Right, that's the original kick and snare I snipped out. Find something that sounds pretty similar. Then maybe do your last-minute sound design like I did quite a few things to change these drums a bit. My original

kick sounded a lot like Reza's kick, and my original snare did too, but I cleaned them up a little bit because I didn't want them quite that dirty for this mix, for a variety of reasons. I will be going in too soon. I'm going to be using this little loop, this little track, for a lot of these future videos talking about now when you find your mix anchor and framework and set it up and get it at the right loudness. How do you, what are some decisions you make when you mix into that framework to make everything work and stay loud and stay clean? I will be talking about that, and I'll be using this project as an example. So, I'm not going to drag this video out by talking about all the mixing decisions I made or exactly how I changed the kick and the snare to sound even better, but we will, we'll cover that soon, promise. So, I used to throw out, I will end with this, I used to throw out a number, I used to simply say, Look, you know, find

a kick and find how loud you can make that kick with it still sounding good. So listen to the kick all by itself. This is my kick. [Music] If you go measure that, we're going to use a dB meter, and we're going to measure the momentary max loudness of that kick. [Music] So this kick is hitting negative 8.1 in its current form. Now the original res kick is hitting this amount. Okay, there's Reza's original kick. They're hitting negative 6.6. Now my kick did too at first. Let me turn off some of the processing I had on that. Okay, so this was the original kick I pulled up. Let's reset this so you can see it. [Music] My original kick was hitting negative 6.7. And listen to the original. Here's Reza's. Here's mine. Reza's. You can hear they're very similar, right? But there were some reasons. I'll talk about in some of the future episodes. There were some reasons I didn't like

this kick, this loud and this long, so I shortened it up and did a little bit of, uh, took out two resonances I didn't like, and I'll talk later about how and why I took those out, so it's a little cleaner, a little drier, a little shorter, but it still has that fat bottom, it still punches, and it still has a thump to it. So here's, here it is fixed up [Music] versus the original, which sounded like this. Now, if you've got good ears, you can hear the resonances I'm talking about [Music]. That's a much tighter, drier kick, and it sounds way better in a big reverberant club space. So that's why I did it, but the point is it's still really similar, still has that weight and heft on the bottom, still punches through the mix. So here's the full mix again [Music]. Okay, so I used to say measure the kick, and then once you've measured it, so whatever number you can hit for momentary max

you will be able to get up to two or three lofts louder than that in your final mix, no problem, maybe even four left. So, it really depends on how heavy you tend to run your mid-range in the kind of composition you come up with. So, if this is hitting negative six left here, the song should easily be able to hit negative five, negative four. Well, add two to that, and you're looking at 4.6. So, roughly, you know, somewhere in negative 5 to the high negative 4 range, you could build a song around this, this particular kick. This is the original kick from res, right? Depending on what you build around that, two left's louder than that, no problem. Your final mix is going to be ridiculously loud, right? So, I used to say something like, you know, my advice is don't shoot for anything louder than negative seven. There's not much point in making your mixes louder than negative seven unless they just fall out that way because of your sound design. But don't artificially try to push your mix louder.

than seven by over-clipping it just to get it louder than that because there's not much point if you have something that's hitting negative seven even down in anywhere in the range from negative seven to negative eight. It's gonna trust me, it's gonna mix in with all the loudest bangers you've got in a live DJ set. You're gonna mix right in and out of those and sound like you're exactly in the ballpark in terms of spectral brightness and density. Okay, it'll work even at negative seven, even at negative eight. Okay, so I am not a proponent of going stupid loud, although some people might say seven is stupid loud. But in the dance world, seven is not stupid loud. I say stop at 7. So what I used to say was find a kick that you can push as loud as negative 10 momentary max. If you can make it negative 10 without it sounding bad with all the things you have to do to it to make it that loud, which is sometimes

harder than it seems. Um, if you can hit negative 10 here, you will have no problem getting a typical mix up to negative seven if you build it around that kick hitting it negative ten. That's what I used to say, and it's still very much true. Uh, I could go through exo here and pick out any kick, and if I can push it up to negative 10 without it, you know, getting woofy or thumpy or weird in a way because I'm clipping it too hard, if I can do something to make that kick hit at negative 10, I can always build a mix around it that'll hit negative 7 every time, right? At least in the genre of music I work in, right? Maybe different depending on your genre, but as a general rule of thumb, I would feel safe saying if you can hit negative 10 on your kick, you will be able to hit negative 7 on your mix if it's a good mix and if you're putting all the things in it you

should be putting in it right. You could certainly hit negative 8. You can easily hit two lefts above whatever number you have here. So, I used to say that, and I feel like I got a lot of questions about that. People were struggling with that a little bit, so I think it's a lot easier in the end to say, Look, every reference track is a little different. Pick a reference track that is kind of the feel you're going for, and then just clip out the kick and the snare from that reference track at full volume. Don't change the volume, just straight out of the way file of the master. Get it somewhere you can play it like this [Music]. Whether it's, you know, on your keyboard or in a drum machine or you're clicking buttons on your screen, I don't care. Just be able to isolate them and play them [Music]. And then go rooting around in your sample library, find something that you can make equally loud that sounds close enough to you to those tones and timbres.

and punch right, even when it's the same loudness. And just use your ears. You don't have to measure it if you don't want to. Just use your ears. And then, if you can find a kick and a snare that kind of match this [Music] or whatever you've, you know, snipped out of your reference track, then you're good to go. And if it's the kind of, again, going back to something like trap, right, the snare is going to be pretty loud. The 808 will be pretty, you know, an 808, and there will be a slumpy little transient at the front of it. And you're gonna have to go find an 808 that you like the sound of and has roughly the same kind of transient kick impulse at the front of it. And mostly, you're going to be trying to make sure your snare is as loud as the reference track snare. If you're doing a bass house track or a techno track, sometimes the kick is really loud in those tracks. Sometimes the kick is kind

of subdued, and it's other sounds that are louder. And maybe the snare is a little louder than the kick, or the same volume as the kick. But either way, just isolate the kick and the snare, a little slice out of your reference, and then dig through your samples and make them the same general loudness. And stick them in a drum machine, or however you like to, you know, set up your kicks and snares. I separate things out into different drum machines and different buses, but that's me. You don't have to do that. You could have them side by side in a single drum kit and just, you know, do what you have to do to make them loud enough. Part of which could be, as I've talked about in previous videos, maybe clipping them a little bit to get them louder. Like, let's look at what I did to my kick. This is the kick. So, did I end up clipping the kick a little bit? Yeah, I pushed it two and a half dB into a final clipper to get it up to the

right amount of loudness to match my reference track. Um, and did I clip the snare at all? Let's go see. But if I scroll over to where the track CTZ clipper is, um, did I clip it? Yeah, I clipped it. Another, yeah, two and a half dB again on this one. And um, you may have to do that. And can the kick and the snare you pick actually survive that clip? Does it still sound okay when you clip it that far? In this case, I had two samples that survived it just fine, so that's what I ended up using in the song. But your mileage may vary. There's a lot of variation in the quality and timbre and ability of kicks and snares and various sample packs to be made loud enough. And again, that's part of the fail-fast benefits of working in the CTZ way. Since I'm testing everything right at the very beginning, at the same loudness, at the same dynamic range as my reference track, it's really easy to say

that kick will never work. I mean, I love the way it sounds, but I can only get that kick up to negative, you know, 12 left before momentary max, before it starts falling apart. So, if I can only get it to negative 12 momentary max, and then the bottom end starts sounding woofy and smooshy when I clip it to go any louder, well, that tells me I can't make a song any louder than 12 plus 3, which would be negative 9. Loves the loudest I'm going to get a song if my kick can only get up to negative 12. The loudest I'm going to be able to get a mix is around negative 9. Maybe I'm okay with that, depending on the genre, or maybe I just need to go look for a different kick, a better kick, maybe a kick that isn't quite the tone I exactly want, but at least I can get it loud enough to hit my target loudness, because for whatever reason, that might be important.

to me to hit a certain target loudness. And again, since I'm ending on these words, I don't want somebody to drop comments in the thread saying, Oh my god, striving for loudness is stupid. You should never strive for a certain loudness target. Just make a song as loud as it sounds good, and that's that. And you know what? You're absolutely right. I am always the first one to say, Don't be loud for loudness' sake. Don't make a song loud just to do it, because why? Why? Okay, if you're going to work in super loud genres, you need to know why you're doing that. You need to know why you want to hit that loudness, and you need to have a compelling reason for it. I think there are lots of compelling reasons in certain genres, especially if you play in the dance music genres. But if you're making alternative rock, if you're making jazz, okay, or whatever, there's plenty of jazz songs these days that are hitting seven lefts, no problem. I mean, go listen to

Adam Nealy's stuff, right? Great modern fusion jazz, amazing stuff. Adam, you're awesome, right? And your songs rock, they slap. And he's hitting negative seven on most of the songs I've heard out of him in the past year, okay? It's not like these genres can't be loud, but don't make them loud unless you feel you need to for some reason to compete. And DJs are the ones that typically have the best reason, right? We have to mix in and out of hot, dense songs all the time. And uh, if your song isn't hot and dense, it's gonna sound weird, it's gonna sound thin and dark and wimpy, and mixing in and out of other hot bangers on either side of it will just suck. I talk about this in other videos all the time, so you may have a legitimate need to say, I really like that kick, but I can't make it loud enough to hit the kind of general loudness range I need to hit, okay? So there's a reason to throw away

that first kick you really liked and keep looking for a different kick that you can make loud enough that you can get up to negative 10 or negative 9 momentary max or in this case my kick was hitting negative 8 by the time I did some sound shaping on it. Originally, it was much louder and so what's negative 8 plus 2 negative 6 and what does this track hit well here's what my track hits [Music] kick was hitting negative eight tracks hitting negative 6.1 integrated okay and honestly this is a pretty sparse section I haven't built this out fully this is just the nucleus of an idea it's only got one real mid-range sound in it. By the time I add in other atmospheres and other louder more aggressive sounds and I'm swapping back and forth playing games with stereo width and things we tend to do in mid tempo by the time I make this even more aggressive oh I'll easily be hitting you know into the negative five range if I wanted to with this kick.

okay, or I can just keep it relaxed and chill and just, you know, say, God, even 6.1 is too loud. I'll probably pull everything back down out of the clippers with the VCA track. I only need to make this, you know, negative seven. It doesn't even need to be this dense. It'll still be in the ballpark. So, see, you got that kind of variation. You got that leeway. But because my kick was hitting negative eight, I knew I'm gonna have no problem getting up to the same general loudness as Reza's track one more time. [Music] Okay, all right. Thanks for hanging with me, and I'll see you next time. [Music] You

Mixing Loud with CTZ - Ep. 9 - Setting Your Mix Anchor & Framework

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